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Thursday, 1 June 2017

My life as a Tapestry - 8 (welcome to the permissive society)

The years 1968-72 were turbulent both globally and personally. I spent them at a teacher-training college in
Cheshire, where I bought a 1953 Ford Poplar from another student for £10. I serviced
it myself, fixed it when it broke down, ran it for 2 years, and then sold it to
another student for £10. Getting that car the 200 miles from Purley to Alsager
(South Circular road, North Circular road, M1, A45, M6, A500) was, for me, an
equivalent feat to the moon landing (and took nearly as long).

There were so many other significant national and world events and
developments during this period that I’ve had to think hard about which ones to
depict here. In the end I went for the ones that seemed at the time to signal
that a new order was a-coming (I’m still waiting for it). The Paris student
‘revolution’ and the Vietnam war on TV sparked a mood of rebellion and the
search for an ideology with which to counter the brutality of imperialism and
the paternalism of the College Principal. I also wanted to stand out from the
various conventional student tribes and be myself. I realise now that everyone
else probably wanted exactly the same, but at 21 I still thought most other
people were sheep.

The rugby crowd made lots of noise, got drunk and broke things. I played
classical guitar in my room with the window open, while they raged up and down
the corridors. The rock climbers were hairy, got drunk and punished some bloke
they didn’t like by dismantling his whole study bedroom one evening while he
was out and reassembling it on the roof of the gym. I bought them drinks. The
drama and dance students wore black stretch slacks and black rollneck sweaters
and spoke with exaggerated intonation. I went with them to see ‘Hair’ at the
Shaftesbury Theatre and took my shirt off during ‘Let the Sun Shine in’.

My new best friend Steve and I read ‘Waiting for Godot’ in English Lit.
and then sat in the bar every evening reproducing the script in Pete & Dud
voices.

The ‘good girls’ (who seemed to be the majority) wore miniskirts, washed
togs for the rugby club, and generally did what they were told. I tried not to
fancy them and focused my attention on quirky girls. My best lover was Lynne, a
long-haired, chunky-sweatered and be-jeaned intellectual who shocked me and
everyone else by turning up at one of the college dances wearing an
outrageously décolleté full length evening dress. (I’ve depicted her here as John Singer Sargent’s
‘Madame X’).

I backed Britain by spending my newly decimalised grant money on double
diamond, and beans on toast. I supported the fledgling illegal drugs trade through
the occasional £1 deal. One day in 1971 Lynne and I dropped acid together – it was
very colourful and intense and it went on far too long, but I’ve never forgotten
it. It somehow helped to synergise all the absurdist theatre, logical
positivism, radical politics, child psychology and underground comix that I’d
absorbed, into a coherent set of exam answers that got me a B.Ed honours. As
the Latin title proclaims (I hope) ‘Here the mind expands’.

I was ridiculously proud of that academic success (though I never let
on). I’d written hundreds of words, all in longhand with a fountain pen, in the
first such test since my meagre O levels, and got ‘A’s for nearly everything. I
wrote a dissertation on Alfred Jarry and a pastiche of Ubu Roi lampooning just about
everybody. I wrote a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ piece inspired by Antonin Artaud
which the Drama Department said I could put on (it never happened). I got an
interview with the Theatre in Education group at the Bolton Octogon and it
seemed that my future was assured.

Except I failed the interview, and had to go
back to London and be a teacher.